HistoriCity | Sri Vijaya Puram, Port Blair until last week, India’s strategic beacon on the vast seas

Port Blair, the capital of A&N islands is named after Archibald Blair, an excellent surveyor in the pay of the British East India Company, who discovered the islands between 1786 and 1788.

Both Andaman and Nicobar mean the same, which is the land of the naked people. The name is a reference to the indigenous tribes like the Onge, the Sentinelese, Jangil, Jarawas and the Great Andamanese. The tribes, however, are distinct. For instance, some are more open to outsiders while others are known to show no mercy to inquisitive intruders, like, John Allen Chau, an American missionary who was killed when trying to force contact with the Sentinelese in 2018.

Author Madhusree Mukherjee wrote in detail about A&N and the tribes in her book Encounters with Stone Age Islanders. “Ptolemy wrote of the Andamans as Bazakata, derived from the Sanskrit vivasakrata, meaning ‘stripped of clothes’. The name Andaman conceivably came from nagnamanaba, Sanskrit for ‘naked man’; the name Nicobar derived from nakkavaram, Tamil for ‘naked’. So, both island clusters were called the Land of Naked People. A Chinese variant, Chuuan-wu, is no more helpfully translated as ‘Testicle Display Country’. The Andamanese intrigued all who sailed by, and not just by their nudity and alleged ferocity: with their small, dark bodies and frizzy hair they resembled Africans rather than Asians”.

The influence of Buddhism on the islands is attested by an explanatory story about the tribes, which has been recorded in multiple accounts. Ma Huan, the 15th-century companion of the Chinese envoy, Cheng Ho, writes in, Ying-yai sheng-Lan, (The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores), “The people of those places dwell in caves; men and women have naked bodies, all without a stitch of clothing...the land does not produce rice; but they eat such things as mountain-tubers, jack-fruit, and bananas, sometimes they catch fish and shrimps in the sea and eat them. The people have a traditional saying that if they have a stitch of cloth on their bodies, they will develop septic ulcers.”

Another 7th-century account by Yi Jing, a Chinese traveller, described these islands as inhabited by man-eaters. L P Mathur writes in Kala Pani: History of Andaman and Nicobar Islands: “This erroneous impression continued to haunt the travellers for nearly ten centuries. The Arab travellers, who passed through these islands, wrote that the people of these islands ate raw human flesh. In the Tanjore inscriptions of 1050 CE, these islands are called Timattive which means the islands of impurity. In the history of the Tang dynasty of China (618-916) these are referred to as the land of the Rakshasas. Marco Polo, the famous Venetian, described the inhabitants of these islands as having heads, teeth and eyes like dogs, who ate persons of other races. A similar description was given by Friar Odoric who passed these islands in 1322 CE.”

The Sri Vijaya empire (671-1025 CE) was a major Buddhist empire based in present-day Sumatra, though archaeological evidence of its reign is poor, various inscriptions help us piece together the puzzle. It appears from an inscription recovered in Sumatra that the term Srivijaya had been in vogue since the 7th century.

The Cholas launched a series of raids on Srivijayan ports and it is presumed that they must have used A&N islands as a transit base to launch operations, re-stock and as a shelter during sea-storms. The Thanjavur inscriptions dated 1050 CE record Chola's victories over the Sri Vijaya kingdom and describe the archipelago as naked land or Ma-Nakkavaram in Tamil. Another inscription states that Rajendra Chola plundered the jewelled ‘war gate’ of the Sri Vijaya empire.

HistoriCity is a column by author Valay Singh that narrates the story of a city that is in the news, by going back to its documented history, mythology and archaeological digs. The views expressed are personal